Thursday, January 21, 2016

LDC 2016 January Newsletter

CFP for LREC 2016 Novel Incentives Workshop

LDC Membership Discounts for MY 2016 Still Available

New publications:
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CFP for LREC 2016 Novel Incentives Workshop
The first workshop on novel incentives in linguistic data collection will take place on May 28, 2016 in conjunction with the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC2016) in Portoroz, Slovenia.

Novel Incentives for Collecting Linguistic Data and Annotation from People: types, implementation, tasking requirements, workflow and results, opens the discussion on incentives in data collection describing novel approaches and comparing traditional monetary incentives.

The workshop is accepting papers through February 6, 2016. For more information visit the workshop webpage.


LDC Membership Discounts for MY 2016 Still Available
If you are considering joining LDC for Membership Year 2016 (MY2016), there is still time to save on membership fees.  Any organization which joins or renews membership for 2016 through March 1, 2016, is entitled to a 5% discount on membership fees.  Organizations which held membership for MY2015 can receive a 10% discount on fees provided they renew prior to March 1, 2016. Publications planned for release in 2016 include multilingual language packs, BOLT discussion forum and DEFT narrative text corpora, HAVIC video clips and transcripts and the latest Arabic and Chinese treebanks.

New publications
(1) Arabic Treebank - Weblog was developed by LDC and consists of Arabic weblog data with part-of-speech, morphology, gloss and syntactic tree annotation.

The ongoing Penn Arabic Treebank Project (PATB) supports research in Arabic-language natural language processing and human language technology development. Generally, the PATB consists of two distinct phases: (a) part-of-speech (POS) tagging, which divides the text into lexical tokens and gives relevant information about each token such as lexical category, inflectional features, and a gloss (referred to as POS for convenience, although it includes morphological and gloss information not traditionally included with part-of-speech annotation), and (b) Arabic treebanking, which characterizes the constituent structures of word sequences, provides categories for each non-terminal node, and identifies null elements, co-reference, traces and so on.

The data contains 243,117 source tokens before clitics were split, and 308,996 tree tokens after clitics were separated for treebank annotation. The source material is weblogs collected by LDC from various sources.

Arabic Treebank - Weblog is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus.  2016 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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(2) NewSoMe Corpus of Opinion in Blogs was compiled at Barcelona Media and consists of English and Spanish blogs annotated for opinions. It is part of the NewSoMe (News and Social Media) set of corpora presenting opinion annotations across several genres and covering multiple languages. NewSoMe is the result of an effort to build a unifying annotation framework for analyzing opinion in different genres, ranging from controlled text, such as news reports, to diverse types of user-generated content that includes blogs, product reviews and microblogs.

LDC has also released NewSoMe Corpus of Opinion in News Reports (LDC2015T17).

The data consists of 108 English documents and 191 Spanish documents. The annotation was carried out manually through the crowdsourcing platform CrowdFlower with seven annotations per layer that were aggregated for this data set. The layers annotated were topic, segment, cue, subjectivity, polarity and intensity.


NewSoMe Corpus of Opinion in Blogs is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus.  2016 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for a fee.

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(3) GALE Phase 4 Chinese Weblog Parallel Sentences was developed by LDC. Along with other corpora, the parallel text in this release comprised training data for Phase 4 of the DARPA GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) Program. This corpus contains Chinese source sentences and corresponding English translations selected from newsgroup and weblog data collected by LDC and translated by LDC or under its direction.

GALE Phase 4 Chinese Weblog Parallel Sentences includes 231 source-translation document pairs, comprising 92,501 tokens of Chinese source text and its English translation.

Sentences were selected for translation in two steps. First, files were chosen using sentence selection scripts provided by GALE program participants SRI International and IBM. The output was then manually reviewed by LDC staff to eliminate problematic sentences. Selected files were reformatted into a human-readable translation format and assigned to translation vendors. Translators followed LDC's Chinese to English translation guidelines and were provided with the full source documents containing the target sentences for their reference. Bilingual LDC staff performed quality control procedures on the completed translations.


GALE Phase 4 Chinese Weblog Parallel Sentences is distributed via web download.

2016 Subscription Members will automatically receive two copies of this corpus.  2016 Standard Members may request a copy as part of their 16 free membership corpora.  Non-members may license this data for a fee.